The attack stuttered to a halt amid a snowstorm of fire-retardant foam. Ten minutes passed, though it seemed to be eons. They were probably regrouping, calling in reinforcements, doing whatever it was soldiers did after receiving a bloody nose.
‘Is anyone else hit?’ Hannah eventually called out.
‘James and Tyson are dead,’ Brigitta replied. ‘I’ve lost two fingers from my left hand and none of the rest of us is in good shape.’
Wondering which one of them had been Tyson, Hannah suggested, ‘Use your suit medical kits while you can.’ It would be suicide to venture out of cover now, so they just had to do the best they could.
Brigitta replied. ‘Have you got any ice?’
‘What for?’ Hannah asked.
‘My fingers.’ It seemed Brigitta had a streak of morbid humour, only just revealed.
‘Sorry, no.’
Angela called out to her sister, ‘Don’t worry, there’ll be plenty of spares.’ This humour seemed a family trait.
A further twenty minutes dragged past. Gunfire and explosions could still be heard throughout the arcoplex, and somewhere close above them a fierce firefight erupted. This lasted for a good five minutes, until a large blast terminated it abruptly.
‘Get ready,’ Hannah warned.
Another blast behind spun Hannah round. They were trying the corridor again and had encountered another of Rhine’s booby traps. As she opened fire on figures only half seen through the smoke, she heard Angela’s grunt beside her and saw her sit back, gazing down at a hole in her thigh.
‘Angela?’
The quiet one of the Saberhagen twins grimaced, then raised her plasma weapon again and turned the far end of the corridor into an inferno. A few further missiles converted it into a route no one would be venturing along for a while.
Next the soldiers were again descending from above and the firefight was renewed, the nightmare continued. This fresh battle could only have lasted minutes, yet it seemed ages before the firing from above became only sporadic, then finally ceased. Hannah gazed in perpetually growing horror at the scene before her: the corpses floating through the air, the commingled cloud of body parts and gobbets of flesh, blood and a thousand twinkling stars composed of glass and bits of foam. The two lab assistants, who had been taking it in turns with the missile-launcher, quickly ventured into the factory to snare a floating corpse from the air and relieve it of its weapons and ammo.
‘Angela?’ Hannah repeated.
‘It won’t kill me,’ she replied, now tightening a tourniquet about her leg.
‘Are we all good?’ Hannah called.
‘No more deaths,’ Brigitta replied.
Only then did Hannah notice that her own leg was hurting and look down to see it soaked with blood around an embedded chunk of glass. When had that happened? She had no idea. She reached out and touched the bloody shard, before deciding it would be best to leave it where it was.
‘It will take effect quickly,’ Saul whispered to her, through her fone. ‘High heart rate, adrenalin . . .’
‘What was that?’ Hannah asked. ‘Alan?’
Reception was terrible: a perpetual buzzing broke up his next words, turning them into nonsense. Then he spoke again, clearly. ‘They’re stopping now,’ he told her. ‘They know something is wrong.’
‘Alan?’
‘I’ve killed them all,’ he said. Then her fone made a sound like some small animal dying, and nothing more emerged.
Sudden movement behind them.
Hannah whirled round and raised her weapon. One of the attackers was there, but he wasn’t armed. He had just propelled himself into a space amidst the burning wreckage, his arms wrapped tightly around his chest. He seemed to be convulsing.
After another twenty minutes had passed, Hannah finally pushed herself to her feet. She didn’t want to think too deeply about what Saul had said. Keeping to cover as best she could, she moved into the factory, first to check on James, who couldn’t have been more dead, then to check on the one called Tyson, who, it turned out, was the girl. She too was irrecoverable. Tired and frightened, all of the others just watched.
She finally headed back to the door, calling over her shoulder, ‘All of you, with me.’
‘Are you sure about that?’ Brigitta asked.
Suddenly Hannah was very sure. ‘It’s over.’
The survivors dragged themselves out of hiding, then moved cautiously out of the factory and joined her.
‘We’ll head back to my lab . . . if it’s still intact,’ she decided.
There wasn’t one of them without injury. Hannah began assessing whom to treat first, then decided that it should be herself, since she probably had a lot of serious work ahead of her.
‘Rhine’s explosives,’ she said, pausing on the threshold of the wrecked corridor.
With her undamaged hand, Brigitta tapped a palmtop fastened at her waist. ‘He sent their location and disarming codes.’ She propped the palmtop on the mass of material she had wrapped round her hand, which was pulled in close to her chest, sorted through menus, then strode ahead.
Once Brigitta had led them out of the wreckage, they came on the first of the invading soldiers, some floating free, but most huddled on the floor, with military equipment scattered all around them. Hannah paused to inspect one of them closely, noted the blood on the lips and one bloody tear below the eye. She knew for sure then what Saul had done – did not need to do an autopsy to know more.
She wanted to cry, but felt arid inside.
Mars
With only three hours to go, three hours of her life remaining, Var had exposed three metres of oxygen pipe, unearthed a lone skull and an old-style laptop . . . but still didn’t know if she was any closer to the compressed-air tank. Only after digging for a number of hours had it occurred to her that these pipes might have fed something else. For all she knew, the tank could be under the rubble pile behind her while the pipes she was following terminated at just another airlock.
She paused and stood upright to stretch her back, feeling sore points all over her body where her suit had been rubbing against her. She considered how all the effort she had put in here would result in some unpleasant after-effects, then remembered that if she did suffer sore and aching muscles later, she would be grateful. Funny that – how her mind kept slipping back to its default position of assessing the future. It was as if, on some unconscious level, a part of her kept cautiously approaching the facts of her situation, then skittering nervously away.
On a conscious level she had a problem too. A while ago, when her crunch time lay many hours into the future, she had felt something like acceptance, but now that time was drawing nigh she could feel her desperation increasing. She didn’t want to die. It wasn’t fair. She had so much yet to do. All the protests of someone on the brink of dying rose up in her mind – all the clichés of an organism never programmed to accept death, and rebelling at the last. She tried not to contemplate this further, ducked down again and continued digging, annoyed by the tears of self-pity filling her eyes.
Another hour of digging excited her inner immortal element as the pipes began rising steeply upwards. This was it; this was where they were not crushed down by the rubble, where they rose up to meet something else. She tried to keep calm, but instead found herself hurling rocks away, scooping off dust, frenziedly hacking with her pick. She started to sweat, but worked even harder when she came upon a heavy pipe joint; felt a moment of euphoria on exposing first a power cable, then the side of the small compressor it led to. Further digging revealed the curving perimeter of the compressed-air reservoir. She worked her way up one side of it, tracking along the air pipes, revealed the top of a pressure gauge, tore away the rubble all around it, exposed a broken dial that could no longer give her a reading, began moving away more rubble – and in the process banged a loose rock against the gauge. The gauge itself, pipes and a heavy valve all shifted. She got hold of the entire assembly and pulled it up, until it came away from the bottle below, revealing the hole out of which it had been torn.